The Department of Energy has acknowledged in court that DOE clean energy grants canceled by the Trump administration in October 2025 were selected using political criteria, according to a department stipulation cited by The New York Times and a public court filing.
The canceled funding covered more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era clean energy grants. At the time, the Energy Department described the terminations as a move to protect taxpayers from waste, according to the department’s October announcement. The later filing says the selection process turned on the political identity of the states tied to the grants.
In the filing, DOE said that, with one exception, 284 terminated grants had either a recipient location or at least one place of performance in states that awarded their electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election and had two Democratic-caucusing senators. The filing labels those as “Blue State” grants.
The same stipulation says roughly 340 other grants that had been proposed for termination were not canceled in October 2025 and have not been terminated since. DOE said all of those grants had a recipient location or at least one place of performance in a state that either voted for President Trump in 2024 or had at least one Republican-caucusing senator. The filing labels those “non-Blue State” grants.
Why were DOE clean energy grants canceled?
DOE’s own filing says the inclusion of grants in the October termination group was “based solely” on whether the grant’s recipient location or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State. The department also said it would not argue that it looked past the prime grantees to evaluate the political identity or geographic distribution of downstream beneficiaries.
That distinction matters because federal grant decisions are supposed to connect to program rules, agency priorities, statutory authority, or some other administrative reason that can survive judicial review. DOE’s filing states that the different treatment of Blue State and non-Blue State grants was not based on a rational connection between the grant location and DOE’s past or current priorities.
The admission cuts against the public rationale DOE gave when it announced the terminations. The department’s October statement framed the cancellations as an efficiency and waste-control measure. The court filing, by contrast, describes a sorting rule based on state-level voting and Senate representation.
The New York Times reported that federal officials made the acknowledgment in court documents released this month. The filing itself is available through CourtListener, and a copy has also been posted by DocumentCloud.
The record described in the filing does not say DOE evaluated the 284 canceled grants by project quality, spending risk, technical feasibility, or alignment with clean energy goals. It says the October cancellation tranche was selected on political geography. That is a blunt admission for an agency defending grant terminations in court, and it gives challengers a clean target: the government’s stated administrative reason and its litigation position no longer match.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.
